Many areas, including emerging regions often recycle and reuse computing components. This habit provides that these markets want to buy inexpensive but fully capable PC desktops. These PC desktops can be repaired and upgraded as needed due to the wide availability of repair/upgrade parts.
However, PCs are still complicated for novices to build and repair and tend to use cheap, easily damaged connectors that are not intended for many physical connect/disconnect cycles. Wires and connectors are typically marked in a single language (frequently English) when marked at all, which often presents problems for English as a second language (ESL) and non-English speakers. Further, many of the pin headers look very similar. Still further, just because a wire fits in a connector or a card fits in a socket does not ensure that the wire/card is suitable for working with the connector/socket. Overall, each interchangeable piece presents a possible point of failure. Furthermore, some failures result in the CPU being non-responsive such that any sort of self-diagnosis or reporting by the CPU is not possible.
Beyond emerging markets, knowledgeable hobbyists consider PCs easy to snap together and often a PC build boots the first time it is assembled, but if something goes wrong it is very difficult to diagnose problems.
Regardless of the geographic location, the lack of function makes remote diagnostics (such as a helpdesk, knowledgeable individual, or otherwise) difficult if not impossible.
Accordingly, there exists a need for an improved method and apparatus that permits remote diagnostics for a computer where the device providing the diagnosis is one readily available to emerging markets and can be provided at low cost.